Recently I ran into a problem with my Firefox browser. Website graphics were suddenly huge and pixelated. All of the sites I visited with Firefox were broken and ugly. I am a Firefox fangirl and there was no way I was going back to Internet Explorer. So, the search was on.

Find Out What The Problem Is

I discovered that many issues like the one I was experiencing can be fixed quite easily. You just have to know which question to type in the search box! Ok, well, there’s more to it than that.

The first thing that you should do is check to see if it’s a profile problem or an extension (add-on) problem. The easiest way to do that is to open your Firefox in safe mode. On Windows go to your Start menu -> All Programs -> Mozilla Firefox -> Mozilla Firefox (safe mode). This opens Firefox without any add-ons or themes. If you still have a problem with your graphics, you probably have the same problem I had. You should create a new user profile because something somewhere is corrupted.

Fix Your Profile

You can fix your old profile and risk the same thing happening again or you can just create a new profile. I opted for creating a new profile because I could move my important add-ons from the old to the new and not have to worry about messing everything up.

**Unfortunately, you have to to shut down your browser to do it. So, make sure to print out or write down these instructions.**

On Windows, go to Start -> Run and input firefox -P.

On Mac, go to Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal and enter the following command (including the first forward slash): 

/Applications/firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager

Then click “Ok”, the “Create New Profile”. Give it a name other than “default” so that you can easily identify it. Don’t select “Choose Folder…” unless you’re an advanced user (and if you’re still reading this I’m going to assume that you’re not an advanced user). Select “Finish”. On the next window select your new profile and then check the box beside “Don’t ask at startup”.

Your new profile is ready to go. Should you start Firefox at this point, you’ll have a seemingly brand new installation because none of your bookmarks, saved passwords, extensions, etc. So, you’ll have to copy from your old profile (.default) to your new one.

Getting Your Data From the Old Profile

If you’re like me you have a lot of data stored in your trusty Firefox. All of that data is stored in your user profile folder. Since you’ve just created a new profile, you’ll want to move your saved data.

On Windows, the files are located in Application Data file under Documents and Settings.

• Windows XP/2000: C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
• Windows Vista: C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
• Mac OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/

Find your default profile. That’s your old one, if you followed the instructions to give your profile a name other than “Default”. Now you’ll want to copy and paste the files you want to move- that means one by one for the extensions.

**Before you move your extension files, go into each one and delete the following- they will be regenerated on startup:

extensions.ini, extensions.cache, and extensions.rdf  **

**You need to test each extension before you continue, in case one of the extensions was the problem (not so in the case with my pixelated graphics).**

Copy from old profile and paste into new the following:

• For saved passwords :

  • key3.db (it’s important to copy this along with your signons txt)
  • signons2.txt
  • signons.txt for browsers older than 1.5.0.9 and 2.0.0.0/2.0.0.1

• For save Bookmarks:

  • bookmarks.html

• For History:

  • history.dat

• For Permissions Cookie, etc:

  • hostperm.1

Congratulations! You’re done. Now start up your browser and take it for another test drive. Look in your tools folder to see if everything saved properly and you should be good to go.

For further reading:

Basic Troubleshooting

Transferring Data to New Profile

Profile Manager

Links lists- or blogrolls- can get quite long and laborious for some bloggers. An exceptionally long links list can make your page take longer to load and distract from other important aspects of your sidebar- if you’ve got ads, for instance.

WordPress makes it incredibly easy to to clean up your sidebar and organize your links in a more efficient way. Instead of devoting one sidebar to an entire array of links, you can devote a partial section to it, and rotate through your list.

Many themes now come complete with a links template. So here all you need to do is create a page with “Links List” (or blogroll or whatever you want), select “links” for the template and publish. No need to do anything else. But what if your theme doesn’t come with a links page template?

It’s simple to create a links template. Simply download your theme’s page template- many times it’s simply called “page.php”. At the top of the page add:
<?php
/*
Template Name: Links page
*/
?>

Then look below this snippet

<php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

There you’ll see a php call for the content. This is where you want to put your links list. Highlight
<?php the_content(”<p>__(’Read the rest of this page »’)</p>”); ?>
(it may be something else, but similar). Replace that portion with
<?php get_links(); ?>
Save the page as “links.php” and upload it to your theme directory.

What if you have different lists for different content types?

It’s simple to organize your links into different catagories on the page. For instance, you may have a links list called “Personal Favorites” and another called “Valuable Resources” and you don’t want to mix the two. What do you do?

First look on your Blogroll page in your admin area. From there go to the tab that says “Categories”. Note the number to the left of your links lists, under “ID”. You may have
“2, Personal Favorites” and “3, Valuable Resources”.

On your links page template, use two distinct tags to call your links. Also, you’ll need to clearly mark which list is which. As an example I’ll do this:

<h2>Personal Favorites</h2>
<?php get_links(2); ?>

Notice that I put a two in the parenthesis. That’s to let the tag know that I want only those links that are in Category 2. Below that I’ll do the same, except I want Category 3 of my links.

<h2>Valuable Resources</h2>
<?php get_links(3); ?>

Of course, you can style the page anyway you want. The important part is the number which is called.

How to incorporate those in your sidebar

Now you want your links to appear in the sidebar, but not all of them at once. To make sure only a certain number of links appear at any given time, you’ll rotate them out in your sidebar. You could use a plugin to do this or you could code it yourself. I’ll show you how to code it yourself.

<h3>Links Rotation</h3>
<ul><?php get_links(’2,3′, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’, ”, FALSE, ‘rand’, False, False, 15, True); ?>
</ul>

This tells WordPress that I want

* Categories 2 and 3 (’2,3′)
*listed with “<li>” before and “</li>” after
*I don’t want anything between the links (”)
*that I don’t want images (False)
*I want my links to appear randomly (not in any specific order (rand)
*I don’t want to show a description (False)
*I don’t want to show a rating (False)
*that I want the list rotated with a maximum of 15 links showing at one time (15)
*that I do want to show updated (True)
Please note the parameters that require apostrophes and which don’t.

If you want to show your links in order the you can leave that parameter empty (”) and it will default to “id”, which is alphabetical.

To keep your links lists separate, but still in rotation, simply apply this code twice, once with “2″ and once with “3″, then make the maximum number shown reflect a smaller number, such as 7 or 9.

Keeping your sidebar clean and organized keeps attention focused where it should be- on your content. You spend a lot of time picking out the right theme and writing the best content. Utilizing a links page keeps your blog tight and clutter-free.

For more get_links parameters, please visit The WordPress Codex

I’ve noticed around that some people don’t know how to use html in Blogger comments. Hopefully this tutorial will help with that.

Basic HTML

The code in brackets must surround the word or words that you want to format. So pay particular attention to the code in brackets. Make sure that all of your code has a closing bracket which is marked with a ” / “.

Hyperlink
<a href=”http://Put your link here”>Nice, short text</a>

*Notice the space between “a” and “href”. There are no other spaces in the code.
* Put <a href=” THEN copy and paste your entire url including the “http://” put it right after the quotes. Then put another set of quotes after your url. Finish with this : “>Nice, short text</a>

Bold
<strong>Put your text here</strong>

Italicized
<em>Put your text here</em>

This is as far as we need to go with this tutorial, because Blogger comments don’t accept any other tags (brackets). If you don’t know HTML and would like to learn a little more (for your own site, perhaps) you should visit W3schools, it’s free and easy.

BTW, that link looks like this coded:
<a href=”http://www.w3schools.com”>W3schools</a>